BYU puts WCC in the national conversation

And the big winner in the great collegiate conference shakeup of 2010 is …

The West Coast Conference?

There are certainly more publicized developments with the Pac 10 and Big Ten, but no conference may have done more to elevate its competitive and financial profile than the little, ol’ WCC – average undergraduate enrollment: 4,159 – by landing Brigham Young in men’s basketball and 10 other sports beginning next year.

“This repositions us in the national landscape,” WCC commissioner Jamie Zaninovich said. “I don’t like to talk about how we’re this or we’re that. But this helps extend us in terms of the national conversation in ways that probably weren’t happening a week ago … It has huge potential.”

The move was triggered by BYU’s declaration of independence in football earlier this week, which automatically unhinged it from the Mountain West Conference and left most of its sports homeless starting in 2011-12. The solution for the Mormon school: Join the University of San Diego and seven other faith-based institutions from California, Oregon and Washington with tiny gyms and no scholarship football.

“We admire the collegiality and stability this conference enjoys,” BYU president Cecil Samuelson said in a statement.

Stability: It’s been three decades since the conference makeup changed. The last additions were USD and Gonzaga in 1979.

But stability did not mean hesitancy when word spread that BYU was considering the bold move of football independence. In recent years, a WCC task force that included USD athletic director Ky Snyder had quietly studied expansion and even solicited an opinion from their university presidents, who gave it their blessing as long as it involved private institutions with strong academics.

A discreet call was placed to Provo, Utah. The WCC was poised to move quickly.

“We had done our homework,” Snyder said.

It also helped that the WCC has a men’s basketball contract with ESPN, which Zaninovich said was “a significant factor in making this (addition of BYU) happen.” It’s no coincidence, then, that BYU inked an eight-year TV deal with ESPN for football.

So the WCC gets a faith-based institution with strong academics; a perennially top-25 men’s basketball team that instantly transforms it into multi-bid conference for the NCAA Tournament; a school from the mountain time zone with national reach and exposure; a solidified marriage with ESPN; highly competitive teams in practically every sport; and a bump in home attendance given BYU’s strong fan support in all locales.

If there are any concerns, it is that the competitive balance could be tipped by BYU’s massive athletic budget and by playing home games at 4,551 feet in a predominantly sea-level conference.

BYU’s annual athletic budget, according to the most recent federal figures, is $35.6 million. The WCC average is $10.6 million.

Those numbers are skewed by the huge dollars that big-time football requires ($10.1 million in BYU’s case) and by the half-dozen sports the Cougars offer that most WCC schools don’t. Still, the BYU budget for men’s basketball was $3.2 million according to the federal figures, or about 50 percent higher than the WCC average.

But the notion that the Cougars will need to open a new wing of the athletic department to house all the WCC trophies might be a bit premature, too. Of the 11 sports they’ll be playing in the WCC, the Cougars would have won only two in the 2009-2010 season based on national rankings: men’s basketball and women’s cross country.

If anything, BYU’s presence in the WCC might illuminate how competitive this collection of quaint Catholic schools really is.

“I’ve said since I got here that our competitive level outpaces our recognition,” said Zaninovich, the WCC commissioner since 2008. “There are very few conferences like ours where you have national-caliber programs in almost every one of our sports.”

Take women’s soccer. BYU is currently 13th in the national coaches poll … behind the WCC’s Santa Clara at No. 8 and Portland at No. 4. USD is No. 14.

The biggest impact figures to come in men’s basketball, giving the WCC a third big-time program to go with Gonzaga and the Australian national team also known as St. Mary’s. USD coach Bill Grier knows what that means: “two more really tough games,” including one at the 22,700-seat Marriott Center, where the BYU men are 111-10 over the past eight seasons.

“That’s what you want,” USD’s Snyder said. “That’s what athletes want. They want to play against the best. Our student-athlete experience just got better.”